In the social scientific study of religion, refers to
symbolic actions, the customary ceremonies, the prescribed forms of rite that manifest
belief in the Divine through patterned and closely regulated social means. (In older
usage, ritual refers to the words involved in such eventsboth words spoken
and written directionswhile ceremony refers to the actions.)

Religious rituals have manifold functions of propitiation,
of rendering worship, and of the conferral of powers and delegations. Rituals operate with
a hierarchical order and proclaim a power to reconstitute the social and the physical.
Religious rituals can be classified according to their stipulated functions and the
elaborate or simple nature of their ceremonial forms.

Some forms of ritual have instrumental properties, hence
are magical in their explanatory functions and the causal reconstitution of what they
effect. But religious rituals, especially those of Christianity, operate in a more
indirect and indeterminate manner in relation to the powers that transcend their basis.
They display an absence of concern with tangible ends that lends a disinterested,
objective quality to their rites. In their ritual actions, the actors give witness to a
gift beyond their discretion to invoke, hence the proper distinction between religious
rituals on the one hand and magic on the other.

The Paradox of Ritual

Religious rituals have a property of danger where powers of
the unknown are confronted in forms of petition. Sacrifice in ritual manifests a gift
destroyed to secure that which cannot be realized solely through social means. These
elements point to a crucial function of religious rituals, of providing social means of
domesticating fear of the unknown. These capacities give them a mysterious power of
transformation and representation that invokes faith in the symbolic and hidden basis of
the transactions. Somehow they manage to implicate the definiteness of their form into the
indefiniteness of that which they signify. As settled social procedures drawn from
tradition and custom, these rites also serve to handle routinely transitions in life
cycles in the setting of religious belief. They contribute to social and spiritual notions
of health in their capacity to domesticate fractious issues in a harmonizing manner where
otherwise the social fabric might be rent. Religious rituals embody cultural values that
relate both to the secular and to the sacred. Civic and traditional properties merge with
those of the sacerdotal, especially in English society. Religious rites relate to values
of national pride and are vehicles for sentiment, such as mourning. They give condensed
expression to national sensibilities of grief or celebration such as royal funerals and
weddings. They also have a dual collective function of ameliorating egoism and at the same
time affirming the necessity of belief in the transcendent and the mysterious. These dual
spiritual and social functions have led to divisions of understanding within sociology and
anthropology.

Like other ritual forms, religious rites dignify
transactions that risk sliding into the trivial. The ceremonial resources of rite, its
stylized actions, its formalized gestures, elaborate clothing and speech serve as
artificial means of providing a protective mantle to theological propositions that might
otherwise slip into trivia, into presumption, and into insignificance. Religious rituals
operate in a series of paradoxes that are routinely overcome: The tradition that makes
them seem unoriginal endows them with the authority of servicing a lineage of collective
memory (Hervieu-Léger 1993) and making rites anew in the present; the fixed order of
enactment that diminishes discretion permits the routine handling of dangerous emotions
and that which might evaporate into ephemeral enthusiasms; and despite a tangible social
apparatus that represents the unutterable, they manage to re-present utterances that
belong to the Divine in a mysterious manner. The fixedness of ritual form contrasts with
the unfixed properties they routinely handle, of death, marriage, and initiation. This
fixedness proclaims a security, a witness to a mysterious capacity for inexhaustible
repetition.

The multitude of functions of religious rites and readings
that can be derived from their stereotypical social facades generates a sociological
fascination as to their ritual style and order, their symbols and procedures for handling
routinely the unknown. But this management of antinomies and ambiguities in a credible
manner marks a limit to sociological understandings of the social basis of rite.

There is a dramatic quality to the facility of rites to
service often contradictory ends. Religious rituals can be understood as forms of theater
(Turner 1982). As social transactions, these rites can be characterized as forms of play
or games that give them a significance in a culture of postmodernity (Flanagan 1991,
Gadamer 1979, Huizinga 1949). Music, silence, awe, terror, and joy are some of the
experiential properties so released that also form the characterizing phenomena of rite.
The numinous and mysterious properties of being acted on by forces beyond human
manufacture provide a fascination for the actors so engaged in this holy hunt.

Religious ritual forms are microcosms of social and
cultural values. In a Durkheimian understanding, rituals sacralize the social, affirm the
collectivity, and provide indispensable means of harnessing the social to heal
fragmentation (Durkheim 1915). Even in civic and secular cultures, religious rituals have
powerful legitimizing powers that rulers invoke through symbols to secure recognition of
their right to rule (Bloch 1992, Cannadine 1983, Cannadine and Price 1987).

This overlap between polity and theodicy draws attention to
wider issues of ambiguity that sociology faces in striving to arbitrate between the social
form of rite (its describable ceremonial rules and procedures), which is literally not
what it is about to its adherents, and the content, of the mysterious, the intangible and
transcendent properties it signifies and sometimes evokes, which lies outside sociological
accountability but that is central to its theological language of purpose.

Sociological Interpretations of
Ritual

Sociology faces a dilemma of interpretation of religious
rituals, of either providing reductionist explanatory accounts of the social mechanisms
that overturn the sensibilities and the self-understandings of the actors involved in the
reproduction of rite, or of bracketing suspicion and trying to understand the link between
the theology proclaimed and the ritual so enacted, which the actors strive to fuse
together if the action is to be credible to themselves.

Sociologists might wish to confirm suspicions of the
Enlightenment that these rites are inherently deluding, that they service the irrational,
the superstitious, and that Feuerbach, Marx, Frazer, Freud, and Durkheim were right, that
they simply mirror the social and, in intensified use, are ceremonial neuroses, rites of
delusion for their adherents. But this reductionist tradition has been overturned since
the early 1970s, with acceptance of the notion of performative utterances, that doing is a
form of saying (Austin 1979), that there is an internal relationship between action and
context (Winch 1963), and that culture is a form of text (Geertz 1988), thus action has a
hermeneutic dimension (Ricoeur 1981). These shifts have led to changes of expectation over
how religious rituals are to be authentically understood. Rituals are read increasingly in
sociological and anthropological terms as openings, as operative and performative
ceremonies (Lewis 1980, Skorupski 1976, Tambiah 1979). Rites have their own language, and
their actors play their enactments by the book (Grainger 1974).

In these approaches, symbols are to be deciphered (Geertz
1968), tacit meanings in action are to be read for what is unstated, and sociology has to
find a grammar for reading religious rituals in terms of their own criteria of
authenticity and self-recognition. The move from reductionist functionalist accounts to
those that seek to amplify the meanings rituals make manifest has facilitated a link
between sociology and hermeneutics that has wider implications for debate on sociology and
culture. Religious rituals, especially those of Catholicism, combine the ingredients of
hermeneutic debate, action, symbol, text in a way that merges perspectives of Gadamer and
Ricoeur with sociological considerations (Flanagan 1991).

As these rites are to be deciphered in the fullness of
meanings they amplify, interest moves to understanding how actors convert the determinate
into the indeterminate. But if rites are indeterminate in effect, the scope for deceptions
becomes enormous, as "lies are the bastard offspring of symbols" (Rappaport
1979). Sociological questions emerge about the impression management of religious rituals
that suggest that they are paradigms for understanding the sacredness of all social
transactions.

Rituals provide a tale in their ceremonial orders, the
reading of which tells much about a society, its cultural heritage, what it values and
what it believes. In Catholicism, the link can be understood in the term inculturation
, the imperative to reflect the cultural genius of a people in ritual styles (Chupungco
1982).

Using symbols and formalized actions, religious rituals
convey a power for dealing with the mysterious through social means that has wider
sociological implications. This sacramental power was understood by Max Weber and is
central to the understanding of recent approaches to the sociology of culture (Bourdieu
1987).

Christian Rituals and Sociology

There are structural reasons within sociology for the
neglect of Christian religious rituals that have so shaped the culture of advanced
industrialized secular societies, and whose metaphors still haunt the sociological
imagination. The issue of ritual seemed to belong to anthropology and ethnography. Apart
from Durkheim's seminal contribution, the issue of religious ritual seemed not a
sociological question. It belonged to the nonrational principles of efficacy and
intervention of magic, and to accounts of the structure of primitive society. Neither did
it belong to sociology of religion. Of late, sociology of religion concentrated on debates
on secularization and on sects, the fringes of the main Christian tradition, all of which
confirmed the notion that its religious rituals were incredible and had failed.
Ironically, in turn, sociology of religion was marginalized from the main theoretical
concerns of sociology.

But as the issue of culture is becoming of central concern
in sociology, the importance of religious rituals as fields for theoretical reflection can
only expand. For instance, the issues of time, space, and structuration of Giddens have
been fruitfully explored in relation to the liturgies of the medieval parish church
(Graves 1989); the term habitus , central to Bourdieu's approach to sociology and
culture, derives from an appreciation of the link between disposition, belief systems, and
architecture (Bourdieu 1977); and the notion of the liminal for understanding ritual and
structure has clear implications for approaches to culture (Holmes 1973, Turner 1969).

Little sociological attention has been given to
understanding the liturgies of Catholicism and Anglicanism, their public stipulated forms
of worship whose ritual order abides by ecclesiastical authority (Martimort 1987). These
rites exemplify an important link of praxis between theology and sociology, where grace
mingles with the social. Sacraments can be understood in liturgical contexts as rites of
initiation (Gennep 1960, Smolarski 1994). Sociological comments on liturgy tend to be
traditionalist and critical of the confusion between renewal and modernization since
Vatican II. Thus one finds unexpected anthropological appreciations of the Tridentine Mass
(Turner 1976), the use of sacramental metaphors to understand culture, and a sympathetic
understanding of the estrangement felt by those whose memory of rite was obliterated in
the face of the havoc wrought after Vatican II (Bourdieu 1991).

Flanagan's study of liturgy (1991) was an attempt to
understand its ritual basis from within the assumptions and expectations of sociology. The
methodological difficulties of studying these rites in relation to theology and sociology
were explored. To uncover their possible social assumptions, the study concentrated on the
precariousness of their ceremonial social mechanism in their realization of the liminal
and the numinous. The focus of the study was on the minor liturgical actors, the choirboys
and the altar servers, those marginal to the rite but who exemplified its basis. They
seemed obvious complements to the playful, the angelic, and the antinomic properties
characterizing liturgical operations. These rites are instruments of the enchantment being
sought in a culture of postmodernity (Flanagan 1996a).

The Wider Sociological
Significance of Ritual

One of the interesting movements in contemporary sociology
in relation to the debate on postmodernism is the rehabilitation and reappreciation of
rituals. With growing concern with New Age religions and new religious movements, the
issue of ritual practices has come to the fore in debates on postmodernity. These
movements against secularization, that seek to reenchant, should not distract attention
from the study of the more traditional rituals of the main religions that are still
undertheorized.

Ritual operates as a form of solace for the self in late
modernity, where it marks the return of the repressed (Giddens 1991). Even in the consumer
culture characterizing postmodernism, ritual services a need for some form of sacred
symbols in a secular society (Featherstone 1991). This broadening of the use and
significance of ritual relates to the enduring significance of Durkheim but also to
debates on civil religion (Bellah 1967). Far from postmodernism marking the demise of
ritual, it seems to have accentuated its significance (Gellner 1992)

Debate on ritual is likely to center on the effects of
internal secularization on the autonomy of rites in traditional Christian theologies. The
fundamentalism that marks a revolt against modernity signifies a reevaluation of the
sacred and ritual in the context of postmodernity. Second, as the self is connected to
understandings of ritual (Flanagan 1996b), issues of authenticity will emerge in terms of
the politics of representation of the sacred in the marketplace and the degree to which
postmodernity facilitates, if at all, experimentation in forms of rite. Issues of
authenticity and credibility will enhance the quest for understandings between theology
and sociology in dealings with culture. Finally, as the implications of virtue ethics are
being subject to sociological appreciation, the internal cultural characteristics of
ritual are likely to increase in significance, especially in terms of the actor's account,
a tale of rite that qualitative sociology is well fitted to articulate.